So you're a new guru cook. You only have TET Loggia to your name, and you're browsing reddit. Multiple posts say "lifeskilling is dead" and "gathering suckz." You're getting demotivated, and wonder if you should sell your TET Loggias to maybe tap some AP accessories or buy some mats for the guaranteed pen.

Don't.

Gathering->Cooking is the most profitable thing to do end-game, and with current NA prices, it's still good money low-end.

All numbers are calculated via bdolytics.com, the new and improved version of bdodae. I assume you have 1s cooking (1.2s with lag), 650 cooking mastery (TET Loggia + Guru 1), and 900 butchering mastery. If you doubt my numbers or play in a different server, do the calculations yourself. The layout of bdolytics.com is simple, and there's even a video guide.

Let me give you an example of a profitable path that compares with valencia grinding. Gathering lions->king of jungle hamburgs.

This path is really simple. You go to Ancado Coast with a good horse, gather lions in a rotation there, and when you're out of energy, you go cook the lion meat you got into King of Jungle Hamburgs (buying all other ingredients), which you then sell on the MP or make into Valencia meals for imperials.

This path is 284mil/hr, with 15% of your time being afk cook time, assuming you're about averagely good at gathering lions (850 gathers/hr).

That's directly comparable to season valencia grinding with yellow lootscrolls...except you don't use any loot scrolls and you afk 15% of the time. Also, gathering lions is not class-based, since most of the time you are on your horse.

And here's the step-by-step gue how to do this:

1. Get a horse. Preferably a T7+ with charge, drift, IA, sprint, and quick ride.

2. Equip it with the best horse gear you got.

3. If you don't have a T9, you'll need carrot juice to heal your horse.

4. Go to the node "Ancado Coast," and follow the rotation in this video

5. Go to a pack of lions, dismount and kill 2-3 lions.

6. Gather the dead lions while the alive lions attack your horse.

7. Once your done gathering, kill the rest of the lions and gather them.

8. Repeat steps 5-7 until you are out of energy.

9. Move to your cooking location (Valencia is the best for this) or swap to your cooking alt after depositing the meat in the market

10. Buy Teff Bread, Pickled Vegetables, and Nutmeg. Or you can make Teff Bread and Pickled Vegetables yourself. In NA, they are 82mil and 56mil per hour respectively.

11. Put 4 Lion Meat, 4 Teff Bread, 2 Picked Vegetables, and 3 Nutmeg in your cooking utensil.

12. Do other things as your character cooks.

13. Sell the King of Jungle Hamburgs on the market.

14. Turn in your witch's delicacies for milk. Overnight process the milk into Cheese, or Cream->Butter, whichever is most profitable at the time.

This path is still profitable even if you use energy pots, at 253mil/hr!

you fail me when you suggest having VP

And now for the "cheap cooks" out there like me...

There's nothing wrong with Fuiya's guide however as Adonaj pointed out, you need some real pricey stuff.  I don't plan to use my mounts as bait anytime soon.    Here is what this casual daily gamer does.

1. Set up in Heidel as a cook and no matter your rank - make vinegar!  It is Muriel's secret ingrediant after all. :D

2. You will not get rich making vinegar, but it does give cooking EXP and is cheap to produce.  I get the most witches delicacies from it and spend them on the cooking EXP and contribution.  There is a dairy farm just southeast of Calpheon that provide cows to milk for free.

3. Across the street from the Golden Toad Inn is a woman named Pasvinder and she wants boxes of food.  She pays real well for boxes make food, box the food, and sell  to her.  At professional level and higher you can get 300K for 1 box I make about 160 to 170, that will give you 48 million per day.

4. I use the vinegar I made in Pickled Vegtables and 18 will box for 300K each.  My recipe is pumpkins I grow for the vegetables, vinegar I made and the other ingrediants are purchased at the Golden Toad Inn.  That has to be more than 48 million per day and I don't need value packs or fancy horse armor.

5. Another good producer for income from cooking is Good Feed.  Any red meat will do (fox, weasle, bear, deer, etc.) for the 6 meat. I grind potatoes or corn for 4 flour, and use any 2 dried fish it doesn't need to be mudskipper.  I think you know where to get the water? If you purify your own water, it only needs 1 for the recipe to work.

6. I don't make millions per hour doing cooking, I only spend about couple hours per day even playing games.  When did games stop being about having fun and more about getting ahead of the Jones? lol

Basically I agree with Fuiya, cooking is a great money maker in Black Desert, but if you are like Adonja up there, you can make silver without spending the Pearls on VP's.  I normally use my Loyalty Rewards to get VP's and post items in the CM for sale.  I wait for a lot of items to sell, before I activate the VP to collect my silver from the central market.

Good guide Fuiya, I will have to give it a try sometime in the future.

Have fun!

Thanks for the guide. It was a good read and it did shed light into the whole process.

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Hi,

your guide, even though it's very thorough and nicely written, fails calculate in the material cost, meaning the price you would get by directly selling the materials instead of cooking. I cooked a test batch of 1000 lion meat, and the difference is really small.

At cooking mid master level with a full set of duo manos mastery accessories (around 1000 cooking mastery), I got exactly 693 x "King of Jungle Hamburg" and 55 x "Jumbo King of Jungle Hamburg".  See the following table with current EU market prices (prices in "()", column 3) for the sale value of the raw materials - I already calculated in the market fees (80% of the sale price with an active VP) in the last column.

So, for my test batch, I could have received 30,206,000 silver by directly selling the materials instead of cooking them.

Now let's compare that with the sale revenue for the cooked goods:

Again, the last column already includes the revenue after market fees (80% of the market price, with an active VP).  I can get 32,344,400 silver by selling off the cooked goods, leaving me with only about 2 million better off -  compared to selling the materials directly.

Another option would be to take the boxes to the imperial delivery, which would allow me to create 57 master delivery boxes worth 31,350,000 silver (57 * 550,000 silver). Selling the blue grade hamburg on market and using the yellow grade jumbo ones for delivery seems most efficient.

Conclusion: the benefit of cooking the ingredients in this example is minimal and you're definitely better off just selling the lion meat in case you consider buying the other ingredients (teff bread, nutmeg etc.) instead of getting them yourself. I admit, you might get better results with more cooking mastery, getting more yellow grade products.

Another option would be buying pickled vegetables or yellow grade jumbo hamburgs on market and packing them into imperial delivery boxes, which leaves you with about 250k silver profit per box at current market prices. That way you don't even have to cook or gather yourself. Or just stick with cooking pickled vegetables for delivery, that way you'll also get cooking exp and witch delicacies on the way.

Or I could just AFK fish.

I'd like to add a few comments and corrections to Caithy's comment.

First of all, thanks Fuiya for the great beginner-friendly post. I think linking to bdolytics (for which I think you did a tutorial video :P) could have cleared up some confusion in the comments.

About Caithy's comment:

I appreciate that you think critically about profit figures given out by post creators. For the sake of providing reliable info, I'd recommend double-checking your calculations with existing calculators, such as bdolytics: https://bdolytics.com/.

The proc rates for meals at any given mastery are widely available and have been validated with hundreds of thousands of crafts. You can plug in a certain number of crafts into bdolytics at https://bdolytics.com/cooking/market/9463 and obtain the number of products as well as the profit on those crafts.

I set up bdolytics for 250 Hamburg crafts at 1000 cooking mastery, as you can see here: 

https://imgur.com/a/13GaQ8N

For 250 Hamburg crafts:

Cost:

33.3 mil (I chose to only tax the lion meat and mark the other products as bought from the market, which brings the cost slightly above what you show)

Also: the market tax is ~85%, with exact values depending on the individual player, and not 80%.

Revenue:

692 King of Jungle Hamburg (proc rate: 2.77): 31.4 mil

102 Jumbo King of Jungle Hamburg (proc rate: 0.41): 5.3 mil- Note that this is almost double the rare procs that you got. This is a good example of why you should ensure an appropriate sample size when testing proc rates to yield results that are robust against statistical fluctuations.

Total revenue: 36.7mil

Profit:

For 250 crafts:  3.38mil

Per hour (12177 crafts): 164.5 mil

As you can see, cooking Hamburgs is much more profitable than selling the lion meat, given the prices and mastery you cited.

What's the bottom line?

Use the calculators available to us!

The creators of these tools have put in countless hours to ensure that we can conveniently calculate lifeskilling profits, so we should use them whenever possible.

A difficult question. :D I think just work hard, save money and work hard

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Nicely put together Sommer! Just one thing looks wrong - the market tax is about 15% not 85%. The latter is what we get after the sale.